My Earliest Memory...

My earliest memory is when I was three years old and my dad tried to kill me.

I was wandering around the front room looking for my dad, bewildered why there were so many strangers in my house. Pushing my way through all the strange pairs of legs, I came into the kitchen and finally found myself at his feet. My dad was scowling down at me and he didn’t look too happy for some reason. That’s when he picked me up, put me over his shoulder, and hauled me through the sea of faces and up the stairs to his bedroom. Sitting down on the edge of his bed, he put me over his knees and proceeded to spank me repeatedly.

I started bawling of course because it hurt worse than anything my little mind could have imagined. At the sound of my cries, without warning, my dad picked me up and threw me down onto his water-bed, knocking the wind out of me with the impact of my landing. Immediately he pressed his hand over my mouth, covering my nose and most of my face to muffle the sounds of my crying. I couldn’t breathe anymore, and already gasping for breath from having the wind knocked out of me, I panicked. I pulled at his fingers with my little hands and my eyes went wide with fear as I tried to scream through his hand covering my face, desperately needing air.

“I’m not letting go until you stop crying!” he said fiercely, his brow furrowed into a deep, angry V. “I have guests here! I don’t want them to hear you crying so stop it right now!”

I was kicking and struggling and still pulling at his fingers to no avail. He was pushing down on my face so hard that I felt my shoulders touching the wood frame at the bottom of the water-mattress, pain pounding through my head, neck, and back. My eyes were burning with the pressure building up in them from my lack of air and the force of his fingers clamped down over my face. When I realized he was serious, I got really scared... He's going to kill me, I thought to myself. That's the conclusion I came to from the sight of his face, angrier and more fierce than I had ever seen before. That's when I knew that he really wouldn’t let go and let me go so I could breath until I stopped crying. I made a first rate attempt at controlling my fear and cries of panic and pain, still struggling to suck air through my nose or mouth—anything to help me gain control over my cries.

That’s when everything went black.

The next thing I remember, I woke up, still laying on my dad’s bed with him standing over me. He pointed a finger at me and said, “Now don’t you even think about leaving this room until you are done crying!”

With that, he left. I sat up in the center of his bed and stayed there for a few minutes, wiping at my cheeks covered in tears, sniffled a few times, and then scooted to the edge of the bed and hopped down to the floor.

Peeking out into the hallway, I saw that nobody was there but I could hear the laughing voices floating up the staircase from the front room and kitchen below. I wasn't about to go talk to my dad again. I went and played some games with my brother in a corner of the house, away from my dad. I spent the rest of the night wondering what I had done wrong that had made Daddy so angry, and never being able to figure out why... why my daddy had gotten so angry that I thought he would kill me.

... He probably almost did kill me... I had blacked out from lack of oxygen. Only the Lord knows which of my other physical abnormalities like an unexplained, non-genetic seizure disorder and mysteriously herniated discs in my spine along with a rip in the casing around my spinal cord were caused from that particular day, or if they were caused by any one of many subsequent incidences later on in my life.